Originally published: Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1958.
Winner of the 1959 PHI BETA KAPPA Science Award.
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 355-360) and index.
Contents
The age of discover. The voyagers ; The two ladders and the scale of being ; The Baconian and humanistic traditions in natural history ; Linnaeus ; The fixity of species -- The time voyagers. The extraordinary voyage ; Benoit de Maillet ; The Comte de Buffon ; Erasmus Darwin and Lamarack ; Early glimpses of ecological adaptation -- The pirate chart. Time and organic change ; Pagan and Christian time ; The chart ; The rise of catastrophism ; James Hutton's world machine and uniformitarianism ; William Smith ; Cuvier: the magician of the charnel house -- Progressionism and evolution. Geological prophecy ; Sir Charles Lyell and the re-emergence of uniformitarianism ; Non-progressionism -- The minor evolutionists. Branching evolution ; William Wells ; Patrick Matthew and Robert Chambers -- The voyage of the Beagle. The age of giants ; The influence of Erasmus Darwin ; Darwin's intellectual background ; The voyage ; South America ; The Galápagos -- The making of the Origin. "The Bridgewater treatises" ; Darwin and Malthus ; The law of divergence ; The first essay attempts ; Darwin and design ; Darwin and Lammarck -- The priest who held the key to evolution. Gregor Mendel ; Pre-Mendelian genetics ; Pangenesis ; Artificial selection and the evolutionists ; Mendel's contribution ; Johannsen and variation -- Darwin and the physicists. Kelvin and residual heat ; The biological retreat ; De Vries and saltatory evolution ; Time and radioactivity -- The reception of the first missing links. The evolutionists turn to man ; Ape and hotentot ; The microcephali ; The descent into the past ; The Java ape man -- Wallace and the brain. The Darwinian bias ; Alfred Russel Wallace ; Darwin and human evolution ; Degeneration or development ; Wallace and human antiquity ; The concept of latency ; Brains and time -- Conclusion. Time: cyclic and historic ; The pre-Darwinian era ; The struggle of the parts ; Evolution and human culture ; The role of indeterminism.
